Last Week in Pony - February 17, 2019

Last Week In Pony is a weekly blog post to catch you up on the latest news for the Pony programming language. To learn more about Pony check out our website, our Twitter account @ponylang, or our Zulip community.

Items of note

LLVM 7.0 support has been merged to master. Great work by Joe and Gordon. Everyone should give them a virtual hand.

Currently, LLVM 3.9.1 is still the recommended LLVM version to use with Pony. LLVM 5 and 6 both had work arounds for bugs and as such were “experimentally supported”. However, LLVM 3.9.1 is being deprecated by a lot of distributions. Joe believes he has found the source of the LLVM 5 and 6 issues (which also impact on LLVM 7) and will be testing out a fix soon.

If that fix appears to work, our plan is as follows:

Get some folks to start using LLVM 7.

If no one reports any issues with LLVM 7 after some undetermined period of time, make it the recommended default

Drop LLVM 3.9.1 support as we only support 3 major LLVM versions at a time.

If you’d be willing to give LLVM 7 a try, drop @SeanTAllen a line and he’ll let you know when we are ready for testing.

News and Blog Posts

If watching someone learn Pony for 4 hours is your thing, we’ve got the video for you! The core team watched it and learned a lot and in turn made changes to the tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuZV6pV7aJI

RFCs

Interested in making a change, or keeping up with changes to Pony? Check out the RFC repo. Contributors welcome!